Literary aristocrats and ideological foes, [Gore] Vidal and [William F.] Buckley attracted millions of viewers to what, at the time, was a highly irregular experiment: the spectacle of two brilliant minds slugging it out — once, almost literally — on live television. It was witty, erudite and ultimately vicious, an early intrusion of full-contact punditry into the staid pastures of the evening news......

[The documentary's] directors, Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, present their ideas with a wide scope.... “They don’t make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore,” Mr. Neville said in a recent interview. “Their lives are the kind of American lives that people don’t have anymore. To me, just on a theatrical level, it seemed operatic: this kind of grand battle.”

Isebrand.com turned 10 years old in January 2014. I wouldn't have expected anyone to notice.... But even I didn't! That's a bit pathetic. :)

Below is the first post, "Why This Site," that I published. Most of the links are dead. (Also, above is a screen cap (click to enlarge) of the top portion of the blog's first page. It's in my digital archives, not online anymore.

OK, I admit that I'm a tad impressed that a decade ago I was blogging about wealth disparity and the top 1%. Maybe I was a bit ahead of the curve. Frankly, they're topics I moved away from over time, though they're certainly on my mind again nowadays.

I launched Isebrand.com on January 7, 2004. It was entirely focused on U.S. politics and done in HTML. If TypePad or WordPress existed back then, I didn't know about them. What's annoying is that I went from several hundred daily unique visitors on average (getting more than 5,000 daily during the week of the 2004 General Election and the day after) to 100s fewer once I switched to TypePad in 2006. All of a sudden many followers couldn't find my blog as easily and it seemed lost to search engines.

Now, Isebrand.com 2.0, as it were, is just a sort of scrapbook of Web snippets, more likely to be about the UK or British history or a good cocktail recipe. On an extremely good day, I might get 200-300 visitors but that's rare; merely 50-80 unique visitors is more common.

If my initial post's tone seems angry, it's because I was. 9/11 and its aftermath showed the spitefulness of G. W. Bush and the GOP. I found the Republican Party's demagogic lies during the 2002 midterm campaigns to be utterly unconscionable. To successfully insinuate that the likes of Max Cleland and other Congressional Democrats were potentially traitorous or dangerous for opposing a rush into a war of choice against Iraq, a nation not involved in 9/11, almost literally sickened me. It sickened me that the GOP dared to do such knavish things and that so many voters bought into it.

By late 2003, I was part of the Draft Clark movement and agreed with Gore Vidal--now the late Gore Vidal (and I still agree with him on this)--that George W. Bush's administration was one of the worst to ever befall the republic, largely a calculating and grotesquely cynical cabal bent on warmongering globally for personal profit and glory, stirring up the religious right domestically, and deliberately spending while cutting taxes in order to cause a crisis of debt that could be used as an excuse to undo the New Deal.

My late and beloved Aunt Ardith Buffington was among the sweetest and least judgmental people I've ever had the privilege to know. She was not very political. I remember being taken aback when she somewhat sharply declared once to me and my uncle when President George W. Bush appeared on the television screen, maybe in 2005 or 2006, "Oo, when I see his face, I just want to slap him." There was something about that man. Not just the policies but the swagger, the smirk, the seeming lack of serious-mindedness, that could cause strong antipathy. In general, I think it was often warranted, and while I am usually good about avoiding the ad hominem these days (guideline: "attack the idea, the message, not the person or messenger") and think it is an important principle, back then on Isebrand.com, I often referred to the President as a "frat punk."

BECAUSE the wealthiest 1% of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 95%combined;BECAUSE the president threw away a $237 billion government surplus, leaving America no emergency funds;BECAUSE his imprudence has given us a $400 billion deficit;BECAUSE he feeds wealth disparity with tax give-aways that help the rich, force service cutsfor the rest of us, and drive state and community taxes up;

BECAUSE on January 28, 2003 the president lied to America before Congress assembled;BECAUSE he exploited the 9/11 tragedy to start an unrelated war, and deceived Americans to gain their support.BECAUSE his war is diverting money and immeasurable resources from the fight against terrorism;BECAUSE his warmongering showed contempt for our allies and squandered their goodwill;BECAUSE he protects officials who treasonously betrayed an American intelligent agent;BECAUSE he and his staff censorinformationand withhold from the American public even basic facts about their secretgovernance;

BECAUSE his environmental record is the worst of any president in American history.

BECAUSE the grassroots campaigns of Howard Deanand Wesley Clark offer the hope of a resurgent Democratic Party;BECAUSE Democrats are finally recognizing the need for better political communication;BECAUSE grassroots organizations like MoveOn.org show that the Internet can help defend the republic and its constitution;

That night, when I went to bed, I took with me Vidal’s 1981 historical novel, Creation, his very under-rated tale of the classical world told from the point of view of an elderly, blind Persian ambassador to Athens, whose adventures and memories include encounters with Herodotus, Thucydides, Socrates, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Confucius. Vidal was not exactly shy about doing virtuoso turns. I wanted to re-read a chapter or two in memory of its late author, and as on previous occasions I found the story and bravura writing as satisfying as ever. As I nodded off, I put the book not on the bedside table, but on the empty pillow next to mine, indulging in the terribly sentimental conceit that perhaps the book would be a little less lonely tonight, given that from now on it had to make its way in the world without its deceased scribe. As far as I know, that’s the only time I’ve slept with Mr. Vidal.

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia had a very
successful premiere at Tribeca Film Festival, but director Nicholas Wrathall and his team still need help with the final
archival materials and post production.

For sheer entertainment value, few docs can equal Gore Vidal the United States of Amnesia...a portrait of the novelist, playwright, polemicist, public intellectual, and bullshit detector. Screenings at the Tribeca Film Fest [sold out].... Vidal (who died at 86 in 2012) was of the aristocracy and related to American royalty (his mother married an Auchincloss). Yet he betrayed his class a la FDR with a vengeance. An iconoclast ahead of his time, he candidly wrote about homosexuality in an early novel, The City and the Pillar, which got him blacklisted by book critics at the New York Times. He knew everyone and went everywhere but became mordantly critical of privilege and what he called the "American Empire," offering, in his view, "socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor."

The documentary was written up in Rolling Stone recently, and Robert De Niro stated that it was on his personal short list of must-see films at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. Ron Mwangaguhunga of IFC TV tweeted "amazing documentary on the irrepressible Gore Vidal "The United States of Amnesia" is the best doc I've seen in years.…"; Carl Ansley the tech entrepreneur and investor in TapMesh and TxVia tweeted, "really funny, thought-provoking shit-stirring stuff. Needs/deserves/will get a wide audience"; and Bevy Smith tweeted it was "More than a doc it was an autobiography" of a man she "long admired."

See the interview with Nicholas Wrathall on HuffPostLive about the documentary:

Remember, you can help fund the completion of this documentary to ensure it enjoys a post-Tribeca life.

You can make a tax-deductible contribution via USA Projects (deadline May 13, 2013) or you can contribute via Kickstarter (deadline May 11, 2013).

Most of lower Manhattan and the Financial District were burned down on the freezing night of December 17th, 1835. In Gore Vidal's meticulously-researched novel, Burr, the protagonist Charlie Schuyler, the morning after the great blaze, describes the destruction during the previous night:

[After the December 17, 1835, NYC great fire] Like everyone else in the city, I was awake the whole night. Half the First Ward has burned down.

It was Dante's Hell: ice and fire together. A horrible racket of bells pealing, of fire-engines clattering, of houses collapsing. At midnight the sky was like a red dawn. Today every New Yorker who knows how to read mentions The Last Days of Pompeii.

I am thankful that I won't be required to describe what I saw. Memory too crowded with fiery images. Wall Street in flames. A freezing wind full of fire--an anomaly.

Suddenly the new Merchants' Exchange vanishes in a long wave of flame. A moment later I was able to see through the walls to the statue beneath the dome of Alexander Hamilton [in the church graveyard.]

From nowhere, a half-dozen young sailors raced into the building and tried to save the statue. They pulled the figure off its pedestal but then the police forced them out of the building just in time for with a hissing sigh the dome fell in and Hamilton was seen no more (his would-be rescuer was a young officer from the Navy Yard--a banker's son, who else?).

A group of Irish approached [Leggett and I] and said, "They'll be making no more of them five-per-cent dividends, with they now?".... Leggett grinned and gave [the speaker] a thumbs-up.

In the side streets the shopkeepers were gloomily digging among the ashes to see what the fire had spared. In Pearl Street there are miles of scorched cloth stacked on the side-walls. In Fulton Street furniture. Nearly every street like an open bazaar of ruined good. The poor steal whatever they can, particularly food...as do the pigs, who have declared themselves a national holiday and are now rampant.... The only contented sound in the city is their squeaking and snorting as they turn up delicacies where once were taverns, grocery shops, homes."

Image (click to enlarge) - View of the Great Fire in N.York, Dec. 16th & 17, 1835, as seen from Williamsburg (sic), by Nicolino Caly, circa 1835. Medium gouache on paper mounted on canvas, on stretcher, 7.7 × 11.5 in, collection of the New York Historical Society.

From Gore Vidal's essay "Writers and the World," Times Literary Supplement (London), November 25, 1965:

The obvious danger for the writer is the matter of time. "A talent is formed in stillness," wrote Goethe, "a character in the stream of the world." Goethe, as usual, managed to achieve both. But it is not easy, and many writers who choose to be active in the World lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. This is sad. Until one recalls how many bad books the World may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers turned Worldly. The romantic-puritans can find consolation in that, and take pleasure in realizing that there is a rude justice, finally, even in the best of worlds.

''The late Gore Vidal used to argue that the American idea rests on the proposition that the end doesn't justify the means, and I think he was right." - Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale

Carter:

Democracy cannot flourish when electoral politics is exalted above all things. The entire point of the concern for civil society is that a successful nation needs its people to be focused on matters more important than transitory partisan advantage. A nation where friends can no longer hold political discussions, for no other reason than that they disagree, is a nation not only in decline but, in the Weberian sense of nationhood-as-common-interest, on the verge of collapse.

And our decline matters. I am naive enough, in the innocence of late middle age, to believe that America should still be a beacon to the world, a nation worth imitating. Plenty of countries around the globe have learned to imitate our self-seeking, our obsessions with wealth and celebrity, and our growing incivility. Before selecting our public behaviors, we should perhaps think a bit harder about what it is that we want to export.

(Contrary to popular believe, one can access UK-licensed iPlayer TV programming from outside of the UK--iPlayer radio is almost always widely available--however it requires a paid subscription to a VPN service, usually for around only $10 a month.)

Vidal tributes and obits will briefly abound. Yes, he was a sharp, cynical, free-thinking satirist in the style of Mark Twain and H. L. Menken. Yes, he was raised in the twilight of the Washington D.C. political class when there actually was such a thing, when Washington was still a shockingly sleepy Southern city vacated by the electeds every summer. (Vidal once remarked that air-conditioning helped found the American empire by letting bureaucrats stay in town year-round making mischief.) Yes, he had a lot of cameos in a lot of films, wined and dined a lot of famous friends at his Ravello home, La Rondinaia, had famous foes, and managed to outlive pretty much all of them.